Mikey Speaks Out

By Elaine Deprince

On the day of my birth, my mother had already decided that she wanted to give me away. She had made this decision even though she had not yet known the extent of the problems that would confront me. As it turned out, there were many, including the fact that I was not born a beautiful baby.

Actually, I was considered to be quite ugly, disfigured by a cleft lip and palate that left a gaping hole in the middle of my face. In addition, I was born deaf, covered with bruises, and showed signs of haemophilia, an ancient life-threatening hereditary bleeding disorder.

I longed to be hugged, kissed, and cuddled in my mother’s arms, but that was not about to happen. Instead, I spent months in a hospital crib, as I recovered from complicated facial surgery. Following the surgery, I was placed in a dark room of a foster home, and left to languish in loneliness for several months.

On a dark snowy night, shortly before Christmas, a man and woman arrived at the home of my foster parents. They had driven five hundred miles through a blizzard, and requested to see me… see me! No one had ever before asked to see me! My only previous visits away from the foster home were trips to the hospital for painful medical procedures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798886936513

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About the Author

Elaine DePrince, a former special education teacher, was the mother of eleven – two biological sons and nine adopted children. After losing her three youngest sons with hemophilia to AIDS transmitted by blood products, DePrince wrote Cry Bloody Murder: A Tale of Tainted Blood (Random House, 1997), an adult non-fiction/memoir written at the request of the U.S. Senate. Cry Bloody Murder had a profound effect on the passage of laws that made blood transfusions safer in our country. She now focuses on young adult memoirs and novels and has written several of them.

Dedication

Mikey Speaks Out is dedicated to Michael-Noah DePrince, a boy whose courage was responsible for the adoption of six West African war orphans.

Copyright Information ©

Elaine DePrince 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

DePrince, Elaine

Mikey Speaks Out

ISBN 9798886936490 (Paperback)

ISBN 9798886936513 (ePub e-book)

ISBN 9798886936506 (Audiobook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023918625

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

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Acknowledgment

My gratitude goes to Liam Brown, the Production Coordinator at Austin Macauley Publishers, LLC, who saw the beauty in Mikey’s story and chose it for publication. I also appreciate the encouragement I was given by my husband, Charles, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2020 but continued to encourage my writing throughout his many years of illness. I am also grateful to my daughter Mia, who would not allow me to lose heart and give up on my writing, even after the death of her father.

Foreword

This is the true story of a heroic, humorous, and loving boy named Michael-Noah, also known as Mikey. He was my brother, but I never had the opportunity to meet him.

Michael-Noah became a family legend. That is why my mother has told Michael-Noah’s story from his point of view in this book. She hoped that learning of the brother I never knew would forever live in my heart, and the hearts of the other siblings who came after him in life.

Though Mikey’s story was undeniably tragic, it was also full of the joy of life.

Mia Mabinty DePrince

Chapter 1

Pain and fear… That is what I felt on the day of my birth. I longed for my mother to comfort me. I gazed up at her. I hoped she would look down with tenderness into the inky darkness of my eyes. I wondered if she would gently kiss the pale blonde fuzz on my pink scalp. I wished that she would cuddle me in her arms.

I never heard the sound of my mother’s voice. I was born deaf, but she could not have known this in those early moments after my birth. However, it was likely that I would have felt the soft words of a lullaby if she had tried to breathe them warmly on my cheek. But she did not. My mother wanted nothing to do with me…even before she learned about my deafness or my hemophilia A.

My birth mother had intended to give me away, even before she saw that I was not a beautiful baby. I was actually somewhat ugly, disfigured by a cleft lip and palate that left a gaping hole in the middle of my face. My twenty-one-year-old birth mother deliberately kept a physical and emotional distance from me – her firstborn. According to my medical records, she had secretly given birth to me in a motel room. Her own mother assisted her. This grandmother of mine had knowledge of my most pressing problem, the hemophilia A.

This is the name that was given to an ancient disease that caused terrible pain from bleeding into joints and muscles. Hemophilia A meant that my blood was missing something that most other people’s blood had when they were born. It was missing Factor VIII, a protein that makes blood clot.

Every day, a normal person’s veins leak. They usually do not notice when this happens, because veins are located under the skin. Usually only the tiniest, and nearly invisible bruise can be seen. When a vein leaks, the body starts to make a plug, like the kind that is put on a bicycle inner tube. Glue is needed to stick the plug on the inner tube. Glue is made of many different ingredients. If the glue maker forgets to add something to the glue, then it won’t be sticky and the patch won’t stay on the inner tube.

Factor VIII is part of the body’s glue that is needed to patch up the tiny hole in a vein. If someone is born without Factor VIII, then the body glue isn’t sticky. In that case, when the vein springs a leak, it just keeps leaking. Somebody with hemophilia A can lose a lot of blood from a leaking vein. If the leaky vein is in a knee joint, the knee can fill up with so much blood that it gets almost as big as a cantaloupe. If the leaky vein is in the head, a person can get so much blood in their brain that the blood might crush the brain. If the leaky vein is in a nose, the person with hemophilia A can fill up a bucket with the blood.

There is only one way for the blood of a person with hemophilia A to stop leaking. That is to add Factor VIII to the blood, so the body can make gluey stuff to stop the leak.